Historically, television services have been comprised of analog broadcast audio and video signals. Cable television systems now receive broadcasts and retransmit them with other programming to users over land-line networks, typically comprising fiber optic cable and coaxial cable. With the recent advent of digital transmission technology, cable television systems are now capable of providing much more than the traditional analog broadcast video. For instance, two-way and advanced one-way communications between a subscriber and a cable system headend are now possible.
In implementing enhanced programming, the home communication terminal, otherwise known as the set-top box, has become an important computing device for accessing video services and navigating a subscriber through a maze of available services. In addition to supporting traditional analog broadcast video functionality, digital set-top boxes now also support an increasing number of services which are digital two-way communications, such as video-on-demand, email and web-browsing. These are all in addition to the host of other television services which are increasingly being demanded by consumers, examples of which include audio and audio/visual programming, advanced navigation controls, impulse pay-per-view technology, and on-line commerce.
With the addition of interactive services, increased bandwidth and the emergence of bi-directional communication capabilities available through a digital television system, there is a need to provide standard methods and systems for billing services provided by and accessed by a subscriber from service providers. Currently, billing systems are integrated into cable systems such that the billing vendors are responsible not only for billing for a service, but for provisioning the service in the system. The billing component of the cable system is typically outsourced to billing vendors, which manually update customer lists each time a new customer is added by the cable system and send out bills every month. This structure has operated well for many years, as the cable industry originally had only one service offering—video. However, cable evolved to offer channels and services that required customers to need a subscription. Additionally, interactive services such as PPV were created, in which a subscriber can contact the cable company and instantly request a particular movie.
Up until recently there have not been many new services added to cable systems, and conventional billing system vendors could write new code to account for the different requirements of each service. These requirements included not only executing billing for a service, but in fulfilling the service because the billing system must send a message to the network controller indicating that a service should be provided to a subscriber who has been authorized. Therefore, if a subscriber called up the cable company and requested a PPV movie, a customer service representative would be operating a terminal running software provided by the billing vendor that tells the network controller to authorize the STB to play the movie. The billing vendor would then make a record of that purchase.
Now, with interactive services such as AOL TV, service providers have to go to billing vendors each time a new service is rolled out, which is inefficient due to the expense and time required to modify billing software. Typically a year or more is required for a billing vendor to implement a new service. Therefore, what is needed is a billing system that is not involved in the fulfillment of a service while retaining all of the necessary billing and authorization functions of a conventional billing system.